Faithful: Godus To Appear On Early Access

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The Godus beta will appear for us mortals not in a burning bush, but on Steam. Molyneux and friends’ “regenesis” of the god game will appear on September 13th, for $19.99, £14.99 or €18.99. Personally I can’t wait to get my hands on it, if just to keep the critical demon which feeds on my soul fed and warm.

Rather fetching beta trailer, below.

Bewitchingly pretty.

Verily, it will be a fine thing to judge whether this new offering will have the same divine pull as the sainted early Bullfrog games. Can the prophet Molyneux prove that his divinations of future worth still have value in these end times?

52 Comments

Combat is one thing that Molyneux has not done very well in his God games. It’s always pretty poorly done. Now I like the idea of the game (the look is ok too), but combat? Hopefully the efforts in that will be better than in the B&W games.

Alot like populous. Yes. You control your population via land manipulation, and defeat enemy via raising heroes/sending lightning/volcanos etc…
It’s a simple game mechanic, but it works – I still am amazed at how adictive populous 2 is.

That’s always been the problem with Populous games (and by extension, most of Bullfrog’s inventive-yet-always-insanely-repetitive oeuvre). They are rather neat sandboxes in desperate search for something interesting to do in them, and never finding anything better than really clumsy combat. And this trailer seems to imply this will unfortunately be the case once again.

I thought From Dust was on the right path by basically having you protect your tribe against the whims of nature instead of fighting other gods, but they took it a bit too far and made it a puzzle game instead.

Off the top of my head – Syndicate, Magic Carpet, Dungeon Keeper, Theme Hospital. All of those had rather a lot of levels (MC had 50, I think?) all of which featured pretty much identical gameplay, just with slightly different numbers each time. Populous 2 with its 1000 maps was easily the worst offender, but it really was very common for the company. They were a “systems first, gameplay second” kind of developer.

I dunno, man. I honestly don’t understand what you’re talking about. DK 1 and 2 were awesome all the way, even the simplest levels had so many different ways to play that they never seemed repetitive. Never played too much of theme hospital, but theme park was awesome too, with a ton of stuff to do. And I have only fond memories of gene wars.

Otoh I get tired of all Settlers-like games pretty quickly after several initial levels when all locked buildings are revealed.

I think this logic can apply to numerous games, Bullfrog or not. Also, concerning syndicate, there were upgrades, new weapons, research… they affected the gameplay somewhat, so I think you’re a bit harsh here.
Godus is still a foetus (ta-daah) so let’s see how it matures and if it will beef up

There is a recent 40 minute video of Mr Molyneux talking and showing Godus here:link to youtube.com

Abridged version:
The solo experience where you just build up your tribe is actually online on a huge shared world. Presumably the game requires a constant internet connection.
Lots of clicking on pink bubbles to make belief numbers go up.
Collect cards to unlock powers and progress through ages (10 are listed) which improve your people and towns. About four hours to get from the start into the first age.
You get cards from finding things in the landscape, clicking on enough pink bubbles, winning multiplayer games, or trading them with other players.
Competitive multiplayer takes place on separate maps. You keep whatever powers you have unlocked, and can choose how many of your people (within a min and max range) to take. You can also play PC against iOS.
Combat (so far) is placing a totem that your people will walk to, punching any enemy they see.
Expand your influence by flattening lands so more houses are built.
Beating someone in a game can give you access to their social media information and place a follower in your world with their name. This is good clean fun and will not lead to harassment.

Peter brings up negative comparisons that backers have made to Farmville and the like with pink bubble clicking, but his answer just wanders off into talking about the history of London. You can build statues that mean you need to click slightly less feverishly, but it sounds like the core mechanic of “wait for bubble to appear, click bubble” will remain.

Similarly the question is raised of balance in the competitive multiplayer where one player can have more powers than the other, more advanced people, or can choose to take in a greater population. Peter just assures us that it’s balanced, and that he considers it to be the best RTS.

Steam Early Access version due in the middle of September, iOS a month later.

That “Click” to collect Faith is a total deal breaker and a big disappointment, and no, “getting advanced” so you could click just one big pile of faith instead of all of them is still a deal breaker. why the hell would anyone would want to “collect” faith?! even PM acknowledged its just a trait of the “pay to save time” farmvile atrocity. if you already have the followers collecting it, why not just let them really collect it? why make it so you have to click the faith bubble in order to actually collect it?

That’s really too bad because the game is simply marvelous to look at and the potential it has is huge.

I know it was a rhetorical question, but the reasoning for having the click-to-collect mechanic is likely because it’s known to trigger a little pop of happy chemicals. Watching workers in Starcraft walk back and forth picking up resources is efficient and can be functionally equivalent, but having the player actually interact to collect the resource makes them feel a little bit of mindless pleasure. It’s not an innately bad mechanic, but it has become associated with exploitative F2P products that use it to mask how dull and unsatisfying the underlying game is.

Where it’s not functionally equivalent to automated collection is if there’s a limit to how much can be available for collection. If it takes 12 hours to fill a village’s pink bubble then you’re encouraging the player to check back at least that often as otherwise they’re missing out on resources. Better yet they’re missing out on resources that they spent all that time flattening land to earn. This is a very powerful tool for increasing player retention. Some might call it designing your game to foster addiction, but “retention” sounds better in the office.

The filling vessel that must be emptied by the player is found in almost all casual-style F2P products, as well as Ubisoft’s less casual Mighty Quest for Epic Loot. Variations on the theme are actions you can only perform once per day, so again if you’re not logging in regularly you are missing out. World of Warcraft’s daily quests (and all the other MMOs that have them) are a classic example, giving players an impetus to log in each day even if they don’t particularly want to play.

Getting people to play your game when they don’t want to is what good design is all about, right?

I backed this as I’m a huge fan of Bullfrog, god games and management sims and still have a lot of (perhaps misplaced) goodwill towards Molyneux for making so many of my favourite games. I want Godus to be awesome but there are so many warning signs and red flags, nicely highlighted in the above comment, that I’m starting to regret backing it. My current Bullfrog fix is being provided by Prison Architect, which I had ( and still have) no such qualms about throwing money at as soon as it was possible to do so.

I am sure it will be a good game. I have enjoyed most of his games, yes that even includes Black and White, which I thought was awesome. I understand people are a little cynical because he talks a lot and has big ideas but his games have all been pretty good in my opinion even if they don’t live up completely to the hype. I wont buy it day 1 but I am sure I will eventually get it.